Gee, would I like to to buy this car. If only I was rich. Leif Johnson Ford is selling it for only $250,000 dollars (only $100,000 above MSRP).

While I was sitting at the light at Parmer and Metric, I witnessed a strange ritual that was held in the empty field next to a McDonald’s. There was a group of 6 or so people that were standing in a small circle facing each other. They looked like they were doing some calisthenics. I imagine that they were holding some religious ritual that was possibly related to McDonald’s.

It is a shame that the camera quality is so pathetic on this phone. A short movie would have exposed this unexpected cabal.

I was at a gas station last night filling up my inefficent beast and saw this. I was amused. Now you don’t even have to figure out if you are 18 or 21 anymore. Just look at this calendar!

Round Rock has a Roundabout intersection. As far as I know, it is the only one of its kind in the city. Some people would have you believe that roundabouts are better than sliced bread, but this is only marketing B. S.. What about my personal experiences? If no one is around, I love it. You don’t have to stop like you would at a stop sign and I don’t mind driving 270 degrees around the circle to do a left turn. However, it is a problem when other people are around.

Most people seem to not know how to drive in one. They do not realize that they have the right of way when inside the roundabout and the traffic waiting to enter the roundabout must yield to them and that it is a one-way only road. Take a look at the picture. The sign on the left tells you which direction to go (counter-clockwise) and the sign on the right tells you that you must yield to other cars. Simple, right? No! They always seem to get this wrong and treat each exit of the roundabout as a stop sign. I don’t mind this much. Eventually, people figure out that traffic is waiting for them to clear the roundabout and they move on.

Today, I experienced the worst thing about unexperienced drivers. And that is people trying to make a left turn in the roundabout. As I was aproaching the roundabout, I saw someone perform a left turn by driving in the wrong direction (clockwise — what seems quick and short to them). I didn’t think anything about it. I entered the roundabout to do a right turn. As I was inside the roundabout, someone traveling in the opposite direction pulled in front of me to do another illegal left hand turn. The road only has room for one car and that car was now blocking me. I probably could have handled it more politely, but I honked my horn to indicate that they should stop driving because we are about to collide and gestured that they were going in the wrong direction. Fortunately, they backed up and turned right to allow me to clear.

So my question is, shouldn’t Round Rock as a city educate people before they install something new that involves minimally trained, clueless morons driving in steel-boxed death-traps?

I feel like I am in Tokyo…

I have a pet. Well, let’s see. I feed it (lately every 2 or 3 weeks). I walk it (or at least I knead it). I eat it. What? Oh yeah, it is a sourdough culture. I should work with it more often.

I run a Debian box at home. It runs a web/mail/file server. I have been having problems with sendmail. Well, today, I have finally become tired of hacking sendmail to get it barely running each time I upgrade it. I reinstalled Debian. I copy some important configuration files over from my backup. I switch to using Exim. Is it quick and seamless? No!!! But I think I finally have it running. I hope. We’ll see…

Update: Well. I woke up on New Year’s Day and was greeted with a dead system. On the console window I found disk I/O error messages. Argh! So, I broke open a spare 60 gig hard drive and installed Debian from scratch. After that task, I shutdown and plugged the old drive back in as a slave. I then booted up and checked to see if my data was still there. Fortunately, it was and I copied it all off.

My system is back up and running. I will see if it holds up. The only good thing about this experience is that I have documented exactly what changes need to be done to convert a fresh install into my configuration. I have already learned to perform backups.

Got in my truck tonight and was greeted with this display in my temperature guage. I didn’t even know it was possible! Fortunately, my truck wasn’t really covered in ice. But it was 29 degrees Farenheit out. Brrrrrrrrrr!

Stopped by Main Street in Round Rock tonight after dinner at Rios. There was a celebration going on. Santa, Carriage rides, Chestnuts roasting by an open fire, and other booths.

I was at Fry’s today buying all kinds of non-essential equipment (a.k.a. toys) and I noticed this sign for the book (Apache Essentials: Install, Configure, Maintain) that I was going to buy. I found it amusing. Note to Ed: You can’t have friends any more because you would violate trademark law.